Letters

Two Degrees of Interpretation

I was bemused to note major inaccuracies about myself in “Vidal Loco,” by Christopher Hitchens (February 2010).

Hitchens’s reduction of me to “conspiracy-mongering” and as having a “one-room sideshow” institute is contrasted by the fact that I’m an academic at the University of Sussex; my book, The War on Freedom, was used by the 9/11 commission; I’ve testified before the U.S. Congress; I’ve given evidence to a U.K. parliamentary inquiry; and my institute is advised by a board of 20 leading scholars. Hitchens also bizarrely targets my first publisher, which is not “deceased” but is in fact a flourishing alternative news source.

This hit piece is merely an example of Hitchens’s projecting his increasing distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering.

Yours,

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex)

Hitchens Responds

I congratulate Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, M.A., D.Phil (Sussex) on “growing” his résumé in the past few years. But the facts remain what they are. When he brought out The War on Freedom, its place of publication was given as a distinctly unassuming street address in Brighton. I did not say that his publisher was deceased but that its then Web site was no more. Any bloody fool can testify anywhere, but nobody has yet been fool enough to accept his argument that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a pre-arrangement involving the United States government. (His pathetically conspiratorial rambling about the behavior of the military and Federal Aviation Administration that day has since been utterly refuted by a long and exhaustive article, “9/11 Live: The norad Tapes,” by Michael Bronner, in Vanity Fair (September 2006). Finally, I think the expression “war-mongering” is better applied to somebody who makes excuses and offers smarmy justifications for the original aggressor, Osama bin Laden.

On reflection and on a rereading of his “book,” I would change my original article and remove the word “risible.” A more apposite term for both the author and his illiterate pages would be “contemptible.”

Christopher Hitchens, B.A. (Oxford)

Roger S. Mertz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University

Adjunct Professor in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research